Search found 67 matches

by nebula wind phone
Fri Dec 08, 2017 3:13 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Ces Cuath scratchpad
Replies: 3
Views: 2119

Re: Ces Cuath scratchpad

Syllable structure, revised Still playing with the sound changes that derive this lang from the protolang of the family. Here's a revised version of the syllable structure. An onset can be: empty, for vowel-initial syllables any single consonant any NC cluster, where C is a consonant and N is a nas...
by nebula wind phone
Tue Nov 28, 2017 4:41 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Ces Cuath scratchpad
Replies: 3
Views: 2119

Re: Ces Cuath scratchpad

Ah, yeah, could have been clearer about that. What I'm imagining is homorganic nasal-plus-C clusters, not "any nasal plus any C." So that includes same secondary articulation, and clusters always match for secondary articulation. My current thinking is that vowels' quality will only depend on their ...
by nebula wind phone
Tue Nov 28, 2017 2:15 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Ces Cuath scratchpad
Replies: 3
Views: 2119

Ces Cuath scratchpad

My main lang wanted a friend to borrow words from. Gonna bash some ideas together here. The vowel inventory is small and essentially vertical, with a three-way height distinction. The low vowel is IPA ja (spelled ia ) after a palatalized consonant, and IPA a (spelled a ) elsewhere. The mid vowel is ...
by nebula wind phone
Wed Sep 13, 2017 8:46 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Borrowing of noun class markers between languages
Replies: 7
Views: 3019

Re: Borrowing of noun class markers between languages

Anecdotally, I seem to remember a story about Swahili (?) borrowing Arabic kitaab "book" as kitabu, plural vitabu, where ki-/vi- is one of their regular noun class markers.
by nebula wind phone
Sun Jul 02, 2017 8:08 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Thoughts on nasals and sound changes in Nyango
Replies: 2
Views: 1897

Re: Thoughts on nasals and sound changes in Nyango

(I don't really have any idea if this is a realistic rate for those sound changes to happen at, but this sounds fascinating and I'd love to see where it goes.)
by nebula wind phone
Tue Jun 27, 2017 10:51 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Nēa thread
Replies: 6
Views: 2893

Re: Nēa thread

Yeah, it's LaTeX. Custom page layout using the memoir documentclass, Minion Pro for body text and Linux Biolinum for titles and IPA.
by nebula wind phone
Thu Jun 22, 2017 11:47 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Nēa thread
Replies: 6
Views: 2893

Re: Nēa thread

Now with a bit of inflectional morphology. It's sort of bizarro-Maya, with all hierarchical agreement all the time and some fun hairy interactions between affix shape and clitic placement.
by nebula wind phone
Mon Jun 12, 2017 9:10 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Risha Cuhbi grammar
Replies: 12
Views: 9231

Re: Risha Cuhbi grammar

(omg "retroflices" is lovely)
by nebula wind phone
Mon Jun 12, 2017 3:49 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Øynduyska - A Germanic Language
Replies: 65
Views: 17356

Re: Øynduyska - A Germanic Language

Oh dang, I like this a lot!

I'd be curious to know what the (internal or external) story is with <bh> and <bhv>.
by nebula wind phone
Sun Jun 11, 2017 11:39 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Nēa thread
Replies: 6
Views: 2893

Re: Nēa thread

Can word-initial glottal-stop be distinguished from word-initial vowels? It looks like it can, but are there minimal pairs? Yup! I mean, I don't think I've got any minimal pairs in my lexicon yet ( ọ́mo 'wash' and ‘ọ́lo 'say' are close) but I do intend to. Are there any allophonic differences betwe...
by nebula wind phone
Sun Jun 11, 2017 6:23 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Nēa thread
Replies: 6
Views: 2893

Nēa thread

Looks like I've been gone for most of 7 years now (holy shit!) but I figured I'd poke my head in and share the link to a new conlang project I've started to post. It's just a phonology sketch so far. Tiny consonant inventory, minimal segmental allophony, and a tone system I'm pretty proud of: tone e...
by nebula wind phone
Wed Jan 05, 2011 10:18 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Either, neither, nor and too
Replies: 12
Views: 2834

Re: Either, neither, nor and too

(Also — I'm pretty sure we said "me either" in Michigan when I was growing up in the 80s. Since then I switched to "me neither" at some point, and now I share the intuition that "me either" sounds 'incorrect'. So I'm guessing that the either/neither distinction is also carrying some sociolinguistic ...
by nebula wind phone
Wed Jan 05, 2011 10:13 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Either, neither, nor and too
Replies: 12
Views: 2834

Re: Either, neither, nor and too

The interesting question here is not "Why is I neither ungrammatical?" — it's "Why are nor I and not I acceptable to some people?" The general pattern is for "I" to be ungrammatical in this sort of verbless answer. * I [n]either. * I too. * Also, I. * And I. * Even I. * Only I. etc... But I'm not su...
by nebula wind phone
Wed Dec 01, 2010 2:03 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Bouba-Kiki Effect - Language universal? Synesthesia?
Replies: 8
Views: 2469

Re: The Bouba-Kiki Effect - Language universal? Synesthesia?

But you can easily come up with explanations having to do with MOA and sonority and labials being associated with round things, which is all perfectly sensible sound symbolism. They're also making use of the front-vowels-are-for-small-things thing, and I don't know what "ou" is here, but it's almos...
by nebula wind phone
Wed Dec 01, 2010 1:45 pm
Forum: C&C Archive
Topic: South Eresian (with a bit of grammar!)
Replies: 52
Views: 12709

Re: South Eresian (just phonology for now, rather unorganize

Why hello there, Mesoamerican Linguistic Area!

(This looks good. And, yeah, the allophony writeup was nice and clear to me. Post more when you've got it!)
by nebula wind phone
Tue Oct 05, 2010 6:30 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Language revival
Replies: 16
Views: 3744

I think one relevant factor in the success of Hebrew is that members of the Zionist movement were already deeply committed to "intentional culture." Some of them were observant Jews; many of the rest were hardcore commune-startin' socialists. Either way they were used to living outside the mainstrea...
by nebula wind phone
Tue Sep 28, 2010 5:23 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: resources
Replies: 722
Views: 306669

A whole slew of texts in Eastern Algonquian languages, if you're into that sort of thing.
by nebula wind phone
Mon Sep 20, 2010 9:04 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: My MSc thesis: Semi-natural language processing
Replies: 9
Views: 2393

Sounds like a cool project. As for your questions: it might help if you had a specific domain in mind. It wouldn't have to be a terribly complicated one. I mean, one of the classic examples of the rule-based AI you're talking about is Winograd's SHRDLU, and there the domain was a little toy world wi...
by nebula wind phone
Sat Sep 11, 2010 3:00 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Spelling standards and European history and whatnot
Replies: 23
Views: 4942

So in a discussion I ran across elsewhere, some folks were claiming that Japanese orthography has an unusual amount of variation for such a widely-written modern language. Apparently there's a lot of disagreement as to what parts of a word should be written in kanji and what parts should be spelled ...
by nebula wind phone
Wed Sep 08, 2010 1:36 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Spelling standards and European history and whatnot
Replies: 23
Views: 4942

Spelling standards and European history and whatnot

I've been thinking about the way English was spelled in the early modern era — 16th-18th centuries, maybe? It seems like there was a lot of orthographic variation, lots and lots of inconsistency in how you spell a given word. And it wasn't just a matter of illiteracy, or isolation between groups of ...
by nebula wind phone
Thu Aug 26, 2010 4:07 pm
Forum: C&C Archive
Topic: [Updated 6/18] Proto-Deithas grammar pdf (you better look)
Replies: 59
Views: 13255

No, it's true — as much as I love LaTeX, its default page layout and its built-in fonts are ugly as sin. so can I make my own format template, define fonts, and whatnot ? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: You probably don't want to do most of this stuff yourself. The thing to do is to take advantage ...
by nebula wind phone
Thu Aug 26, 2010 12:25 pm
Forum: C&C Archive
Topic: [Updated 6/18] Proto-Deithas grammar pdf (you better look)
Replies: 59
Views: 13255

No, it's true — as much as I love LaTeX, its default page layout and its built-in fonts are ugly as sin.
by nebula wind phone
Thu Aug 26, 2010 10:43 am
Forum: C&C Archive
Topic: [Updated 6/18] Proto-Deithas grammar pdf (you better look)
Replies: 59
Views: 13255

Yeah, I just assumed you'd LaTeXed it too. (It probably woulda been easier with LaTeX — but then again, I always think everyone's lives would be easier with LaTeX, even if the only thing they ever type is letters to Grandma.) That's a seriously impressive document to have wrung out of Word.
by nebula wind phone
Wed Aug 25, 2010 7:52 pm
Forum: C&C Archive
Topic: [Updated 6/18] Proto-Deithas grammar pdf (you better look)
Replies: 59
Views: 13255

I'm liking the way you do oblique case for monosyllables. Very quirky but well justified.

Only complaint so far is that the table of primary personal prefixes is crazy hard to read.
by nebula wind phone
Sat Aug 21, 2010 4:56 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Diachronics of demonstratives
Replies: 23
Views: 11345

You know, I'll sometimes start a sentence fragment with a relative pronoun. (Which is admittedly a pretty colloquial thing to do, but I still do it.) And you could imagine that relative pronoun turning into a demonstrative over time. (After which, these parenthetical comments would stop sounding lik...